You Will Continue to Inspire

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Ben, RachelBy Ben Wideman, community pastor of the 3rd Way Collective in State College, Pennsylvania

*This piece was originally posted on the 3rd Way Collective blog on May 6, 2019.

Dear Rachel Held Evans,

I’m writing with a long-overdue note of appreciation. Last week’s news of your passing shook me at a deeper level than I anticipated, and I wondered if putting words on paper would help me process some of what I felt.

I think my first memory of you was hearing about your second book, A Year of Biblical Womanhood. I’m guessing that my reaction to hearing about an effort to live according to a legalistic reading of scripture was typical of many short-sighted folks at the time… hadn’t AJ Jacobs already tried that and written a book about the experience a few years prior? Was yours just going to be the female version of that? Continue reading “You Will Continue to Inspire” →

Wild Lectionary: Sheep, Gazelle and Rock

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45073825842_789e1c317b_bActs 9:36-43
Psalm 23

By Laurel Dykstra

On this Good Shepherd Sunday, our annual engagement with the repeated biblical assertion that both kingship and divine-human relations resemble sheep husbandry, the lectionary illuminates two key aspects of the emerging Wild Church Movement. Connected to both Watershed Discipleship and Contemplative Ecology, Wild Church is nothing more than Christians who intentionally worship, or seek to experience holiness, outside of buildings. In forests, deserts, city parks, beaches, urban vacant lots we reassert the strand of our tradition where wilderness is the place of divine encounter. Continue reading “Wild Lectionary: Sheep, Gazelle and Rock” →

To what do I devote my life?

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DSC04133(1)
by Becker1999 Flickr, cc

By Dahr Jamail, excerpted from a piece from TruthOut.org

By way of the corporate capitalist industrial growth culture within which most of us have been raised and immersed, we have become disconnected from the planet we are so deeply part of. This, I believe, is the root cause of the climate crisis we now find ourselves in. Hence, the first step toward answering the question of “how to be” during this time, which must be answered before any of us can decide “what to do,” is to connect ourselves back to the planet. For we cannot begin to walk until our feet are on the ground.

Each day I wake and begin to process the daily news of the climate catastrophe and the global political tilt into overt fascism. The associated trauma, grief, rage and despair that come from all of this draws me back to the work of Stan Rushworth, Cherokee elder, activist and scholar, who has guided much of my own thinking about how to move forward. Rushworth has reminded me that while Western colonialist culture believes in “rights,” many Indigenous cultures teach of “obligations” that we are born into: obligations to those who came before, to those who will come after, and to the Earth itself.

Hence, when the grief and rage threaten to consume me, I now orient myself around the question, “What are my obligations?” In other words, “From this moment on, knowing what is happening to the planet, to what do I devote my life?“

Each of us must ask ourselves this question every day, as we face down catastrophe.

Everyday Radical

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IMG_1388By Rev. Joanna Harader (right)

*This is part of a series of pieces from contributors all over North America each answering the question, “How would you define radical discipleship?” We will be posting responses regularly on Mondays during 2019.

I was struck by Rev. Dr. Victoria Marie’s statement that, in thinking of “radical discipleship,” “there is only discipleship.” The adjective is unnecessary, because to follow Jesus is radical. Period.

I get the temptation to add “radical,” though. Because we want to differentiate actually following Jesus from what too often passes as being Christian in our society. We add “radical” to remind ourselves that discipleship is not about just believing the right theology or showing up in the right place every Sunday or voting for the right political party or hanging the right calligraphied Bible verse poster above our couch. Continue reading “Everyday Radical” →

A Theology that Loves Out Loud

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Eboni
PC: arika.org.uk

From the opening paragraphs of Eboni Marshall Turman’s March 2019 article “Black Women’s Faith, Black Women’s Flourishing,” originally posted in the March 2019 edition of The Christian Century. Turman teaches at Yale Divinity School and is the author of Toward a Womanist Ethic of Incarnation: Black Bodies, the Black Church, and the Council of Chalcedon. Read the article in its entirety at The Christian Century here.

In 1985, while presenting her essay “The Emergence of Black Feminist Consciousness” to a room filled almost entirely with white theologians at the annual meeting of the American Academy of Religion, Katie Geneva Cannon fainted. It’s little wonder she was nervous. Hers was the first paper ever presented on womanist theology at the AAR, and it was a daring and dangerous proposition at the time. In the theological academy until the 1980s, as black feminist Akasha Gloria Hull notes, “all the women were white and all the blacks were men.” Continue reading “A Theology that Loves Out Loud” →

Bearing Witness While Living with Chronic Illness

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Warehouse picture 2016By Oz Cole-Arnal, former professor emeritus at Waterloo Lutheran Seminary

Over a period of roughly forty-five weeks (with an interlude of thirty weeks), I have come to know and deeply respect Tony Bender (photo right). We are both part of a Parkinson’s group to help determine what may help people live with this degenerative physical disease and its challenges. Over time this group and its trainers (university students working on graduate degrees in kinesiology), under the direction of Dr. Quincy Almeida (internationally renowned Parkinson’s expert) have become a team of mutual support and respect. This Friday two days before Palm Sunday, Tony opened his heart in glorious vulnerability with this powerful lament which he read to us all before Kish, Jordan and crowd led us in our “boxing” and related exercises: Continue reading “Bearing Witness While Living with Chronic Illness” →

We’re Not Alone in This Commitment

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FletcherFrom Jeannine Hill Fletcher, Professor of Theology at Fordham University, Bronx NY and author of The Sin of White Supremacy:  Christianity, Racism and Religious Diversity in America (Orbis, 2017). This is an excerpt from a sermon originally posted in June 2018 at Catholic Women Preach entitled “Body and Blood of Christ.” Read the sermon in its entirety here.

When Christians drink the cup of the covenant, we insert ourselves in the final meal of the One who gave over his body and his blood in the stand against the systems of violence in his world, committing his blood to reveal that things could be different.  And we’re not alone in this commitment.  In 1953, Mamie Till raised her son Emmett to an international gaze when she had the courage to show how the sin of White supremacy made the blood of her only son flow to his death.  In 2018, from out of the aftermath of the blood that flowed from a code red active shooter, Emma Gonzalez had the courage to name how blood is meant for life.  In Charlottesville, and Philadelphia, and New York City, people are finding the courage to stand and to march, to show up and stand against the blood the flows from White insecurities and White supremacies which refuse to acknowledge that Black Lives Matter.  Christians are committing to the life blood of fathers, uncles and mothers threatened when ICE decides that no space is sacred.  In response to the triple threat of racism, materialism and militarism, the many movements in our day carry on the work of the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King who witnessed with his blood what it looks like to be in covenantal relationship with the God who dwells in human beings, responding to violence with peace; even if it means giving over one’s life.

Wild Lectionary: Raised for the Great Turning

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Easter 3C
John 21:1-19

Bring some fish you have caught and come and have breakfast

By The Rev. Marilyn Zehr

This week I loved reading the resurrection story of barbequed fish and bread on the beach through Joanna Macy’s three narrative lens of business as usual, the great unraveling, and the great turning. Continue reading “Wild Lectionary: Raised for the Great Turning” →